Celebrated French virtuosi Emmanuel Séjourné and Sylive Reynaert (Strasbourg Conservatoire) perform with Piñata Percussion. The program will feature Séjourné's popular compositions for marimba and vibraphone alongside exciting international repertoire.

Launch of the UWA Public Policy Institute's new publication - Big Issues for Western Australia

The UWA Public Policy Institute is pleased to announce the launch of a major new publication, Big Issues for Western Australia.

We have gathered the opinions and practical suggestions of key WA figures across a wide range of issues, which have all been collated into a new publication to be officially launched on Tuesday 20 August 2019.

Big Issues for Western Australia gets opinion formers to look at concerns that are vital for the future success of the state’s economy, communities, public services and social cohesion. Contributors are focused on old and new problems, fresh ideas and approaches, and crucially, the use of evidence and expertise to set policy choices, drawing on examples of what works elsewhere that can have traction in WA.

Join us at this launch where you will have the opportunity to hear from a panel of our contributors and the UWA Public Policy Institute’s work to support evidence-based public policy in WA.

Family violence and violence against women remain a major issue globally and in Australia. This affects migrant communities, including Muslim families, in Australia. In this presentation, Rachel Mathewson will outline the Home Affairs provisions and support provided for visa-holders affected by family violence. The information is practical and explains when and how people contact the Department and the types of information required.

Rachel Mathewson is the Assistant Director of the WA Community Engagement team with the Department of Home Affairs. She has worked in the Department since 2007 in a variety of roles from Learning and Development, Student Visas and Refugee and Humanitarian.

Abstract:
This talk has three main sections:
1. An outline of the main sedimentary processes controlling coastal and marine archaeological sites, with a focus on Australia's NW shelf. This is relevant because it is a critical control upon much archaeological work in NW Australia, but it is poorly dealt with or, at worst, ignored.
2. A critique of the ongoing mis-use of radiocarbon dates as data in studies of past human demography.
3. An analysis of why these and other critical issues can become overlooked by some in archaeology, with a view of how it can be resolved to improve the quality of everyone's research.

Bio:
In western Europe and Australia, Piers Larcombe has had 30 years of fun in sedimentary research, trying to understand how sedimentary systems work. His aim is that research and applied studies should use more information about the relevant physical systems.

The “butterfly effect” was coined in 1972 by Edward Lorenz in a talk titled “does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” It models how a small action can have a significant impact.

In this year’s Grace Vaughan Memorial Lecture, the Honourable Antoinette Kennedy AO, Western Australia’s first and longest serving female judge, will speak about the history of women in the law and her own history and what that has taught her about the many issues faced by women. The progressive act of taking opportunity and then using that position to speak truth for those that are voiceless is a feature of Antoinette’s life, and the essence of this year’s Grace Vaughan Memorial Lecture. Throughout her career, Antoinette’s primary interest was not what Governments could do for women - though she regards this as important - but what women could do for each other if they were properly informed and had the will. In particular, Antoinette is interested to explore what can be achieved when women support each other, have their consciousness raised, the freedom to look at issues outside of the male gaze and each woman has a power base consisting of every other woman.

Her talk will explore this concept as it applies to issues that particularly concern women and girls, in particular, family violence, the victimisation of girls through paedophilia, and how ignorance of this has left parents and the community undereducated and less able to protect girls. Finally, Antoinette will discuss the #Metoo movement as the most recent iteration of the women’s equality movement.

The Honourable Antoinette Kennedy AO was the first and longest serving female judge in Western Australia, serving for 25 years, and despite her retirement, remains the longest serving judge in the state. She was the first woman appointed as Chief Judge of the District Court (the first female head of a jurisdiction in WA and only the third in Australia) in 2004. She was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and was inducted into the WA Women’s Hall of Fame in 2012.

The annual Grace Vaughan Memorial Lecture lecture commemorates the life and achievements of Grace Vaughan, a social worker, social activist and parliamentarian, who was dedicated to the improvement of life at all levels and had a deep commitment to Australia’s participation in the Asian region and to ensuring women’s full participation in society. The lecture is presented by the Australian Association of Social Workers, the Institute of Advanced Studies at The University of Western Australia and Department of Communities Western Australia.

What are the realities and challenges of community-led, on-country language-revitalisation/maintenance of Martu languages in the Western Desert today?

After graduating from the ANU in 2015 with Honours in Language Studies, Duke (Garry Earl-Spurr) moved to the East Pilbara in mid-2016 to work as an applied linguist for Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa (KJ) – a Martu organisation that aims to keep country and culture strong, and to build sustainable Martu communities. Since then, KJ’s language program has been steadily gaining momentum as language increasingly becomes integrated into all facets of KJ’s work.

Duke will speak about the realities and challenges of working as an applied linguist and a part of KJ’s Martu language team on the revitalisation and maintenance of Martu languages in the Western Desert. He will discuss the integral role of language in underpinning the fundamental and amorphously intertwined Martu aspirations of strong culture, right-way land-management, and sustainable community development.

Key themes will include: Language policy & management; working and learning together in a cross-cultural setting; language and caring for country; language and cultural empowerment; language and sustainable development in the Western Desert; intergenerational transmission; decolonisation; and Western Desert Languages.

In the wake of choice: Perth’s autonomous women’s engagement with the discourse of choice via post-abortion narratives presented by Dorinda ’t Hart.

Pro-abortion discourse generally presents abortion as an unproblematic event in the course of a woman’s reproductive life. However, pre-field discussions with women confirm that an abortion experience is a significant episode in an individual’s life and not easily forgotten.
Further, current research tends to present some women as autonomous agents who have unobstructed access to abortion services while empirically examining barriers to access for those women who are considered less autonomous. However, this research fails to examine the intersection of women’s perceived autonomy and the internalisation of social norms that guide and inform a woman’s abortion decision. Via this research project, I aim to engage with women’s post-abortion narratives, shared through in-depth interviews throughout Perth. Through the recruitment of those women who consider themselves to be autonomous, I seek to understand each woman’s engagement with the discourse of choice and their ongoing negotiation of meaning of their abortion experience.

Older Vietnam-born people (OVP) make up the sixth largest migrant community in Australia; however, they are under-researched. To help address this gap in the literature, this study will examine OVP’s experiences of ageing and aged care, using qualitative research methods, including ethnographic interviews, participant observation, social media fieldwork, video recording, and social network analysis tools guided by an interpretive phenomenological paradigm and grounded theory. The central research question is “How are Vietnam-born parent migrants and parent visitors experiencing ageing and aged care in Australia and what is the role of their local, virtual and distant support networks?”. The research will be conducted in Perth and Melbourne, cities which have a large number of older Vietnam-born residents (ABS, 2016b). The research will target two groups: (i) parent migrants and (ii) parent visitors that represent a mix of past and recent Vietnamese migration to Australia.

Hien Thi Nguyen is a PhD student in the Anthropology and Sociology Discipline. Her research interests include domestic and transnational migration, ageing and aged care, women and gender and new media.

Monday 26

18:00 - PUBLIC TALK - Why "home" matters the most for people on the move

A public lecture by Paolo Boccagni, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Trento, Italy and 2019 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

All across social sciences and humanities, "home" has emerged as a unique research topic, despite its inherent ambiguity, as it bridges a variety of divides - public vs private, material vs immaterial, descriptive vs prescriptive, "us" vs "them". However, under conditions of displacement and large-scale migration home is no more what it used to be. From an apparently natural background to people's lives, it turns into something to be achieved, or recovered, from scratch. Struggling for an adequate and ideally better home, successfully or not, is a process that irremediably parallels migrant life trajectories. Likewise, retaining some aspects of all that used to stand for home, while adapting to the views, emotions and practices associated with home in the countries of destination, is critical to migrant and refugee integration over time. Whether for practical purposes or in a more existential sense, coping with home anew is part and parcel of the migrant condition. Parallel to that, home - as a set of emplaced relationships and emotions, not just a place - is a key analytical tool for researching migrant trajectories and the attendant social transformations. Based on an original sociological understanding of home, and on the European Research Council HOMInG project, this lecture invites you to appreciate the significance of home for displaced and migrant people, as an often unaccomplished experience and as a balancing act between past, present and future. The methodological implications and the policy relevance of research on home and migration will also be discussed, against the backdrop of “homing” as a universal and often unmet human need.

All across social sciences and humanities, “home” has
emerged as a unique research topic, despite its inherent
ambiguity, as it bridges a variety of divides - public vs
private, material vs immaterial, descriptive vs prescriptive,
“us” vs “them”. However, under conditions of displacement
and large-scale migration home is no more what it used to
be. From an apparently natural background to people’s lives,
it turns into something to be achieved, or recovered, from
scratch. Struggling for an adequate and ideally better home,
successfully or not, is a process that irremediably parallels
migrant life trajectories. Likewise, retaining some aspects
of all that used to stand for home, while adapting to the
views, emotions and practices associated with home in the
countries of destination, is critical to migrant and refugee
integration over time. Whether for practical purposes or
in a more existential sense, coping with home anew is part
and parcel of the migrant condition. Parallel to that, home
- as a set of emplaced relationships and emotions, not just
a place - is a key analytical tool for researching migrant
trajectories and the attendant social transformations.
Based on an original sociological understanding of home,
and on the European Research Council HOMInG project, this
lecture invites you to appreciate the significance of home for
displaced and migrant people, as an often unaccomplished
experience and as a balancing act between past, present
and future. The methodological implications and the policy
relevance of research on home and migration will also be
discussed, against the backdrop of “homing” as a universal
and often unmet human need.

Paolo Boccagni’s main areas of expertise are international
migration, transnationalism, social welfare, care, diversity
and home. His current research is on home-making and
home-feeling processes, as a critical question for the
everyday negotiation of boundaries between native and
foreign-born populations. As the Principal Investigator of the
European Research Council Starting Grant project HOMInG
and of MIUR (Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e
della Ricerca) HOASI (Home and Asylum Seekers in Italy),
Paolo is leading a team of seven postdoctoral researcher
fellows, doing multi-sited fieldwork on the experience
of home among migrants and refugees in nine different
countries. Based on these large-scale collaborative
projects, Paolo is elaborating on “homing” as a lifelong set
of processes through which individuals and groups try to
make themselves at home. In recent years he has also done
fieldwork on the ways of framing and approaching immigrant
and refugee clients among social workers; on the lived
experience and the sense of home of international students;
on the built environment, material cultures and thresholds of domesticity in refugee reception initiatives.

Please RSVP online via www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/boccagni

Tuesday 27

10:00 - SEMINAR - Should we say sorry? An examination of the treatment of people of Chinese cultural heritage in Western Australia between 1820s and 1970s.

People of Chinese cultural heritage has been part of the history of Western Australia since the proclamation of the Swan River Colony. They in the past were subjected to certain policies, which were legal but arguably unjust in light of contemporary societal attitude towards equality and fairness. Such policies included the poll tax (also known as the “head tax”), tonnage restrictions, exclusion from goldfields, and the dictation test. The project intends to study the period from the beginning of British settlement to the time around the abolition of the White Australia Policy. Through a cross-disciplinary approach, the project intends to examine in detail, these policies and their impact on people of Chinese cultural heritage in Western Australia during that period.

People of Chinese cultural heritage were subjected to similar policies in other countries and other Australian states around the same time. In recent decades, many of these jurisdictions including New Zealand and Victoria have issued apologies for their past policies concerning their people of Chinese cultural heritage.

During the preliminary research of this project, it is apparent that there are ample literature on the people of Chinese cultural heritage and their experiences during the 1800s and 1900s in Western Australia. There are also an abundance of literature related to the apologies which have been made in the past. However, there is little evidence of any discussion on whether the policies of the governments of Western Australia towards its people of Chinese cultural heritage should be debated. From an academic point of view, it is of significance to address that.

It is worth noting that if there is ever going to be any public debate about this, such debate should be up to all West Australians and West Australians alone.

This project aims to, through a comparative approach, combine the studies of the history concerning the people of Chinese cultural heritage in Western Australia, the apologies delivered to people of Chinese cultural heritage in other jurisdictions for similar policies, and the apologies made to other groups of Australians to analyse whether an apology should or should not be made for its policies towards its people of Chinese cultural heritage in the past. It should always be remembered that this project is about examining whether or not a state apology is appropriate, not about finding ways to justify an apology.

Interested Postgraduate Students and Early Career
Researchers whose research engages with themes of
migration, home, identity and belonging are invited
to attend a special research workshop with Professor
Paolo Boccagni. Participants will give brief presentations
summarising their research on these themes for discussion
with Professor Boccagni and their academic peers.

About the Presenter

Paolo Boccagni is an associate professor in Sociology at the
University of Trento, Italy. His main areas of expertise are
international migration, transnationalism, social welfare,
care, diversity and home. His current research is on homemaking
and home-feeling processes, as a critical question
for the everyday negotiation of boundaries between native
and foreign-born populations. As the Principal Investigator
of the European Research Council Starting Grant
project HOMInG and of MIUR (Ministero dell’Istruzione,
dell’Università e della Ricerca) HOASI (Home and Asylum
Seekers in Italy), Paolo is leading a team of seven
postdoctoral researcher fellows, doing multi-sited fieldwork
on the experience of home among migrants and refugees
in nine different countries. Based on these large-scale
collaborative projects, Paolo is elaborating on “homing”
as a lifelong set of processes through which individuals
and groups try to make themselves at home. In recent
years he has also done fieldwork on the ways of framing
and approaching immigrant and refugee clients among
social workers; on the lived experience and the sense of
home of international students; on the built environment,
material cultures and thresholds of domesticity in refugee
reception initiatives. Paolo has published in over 30
international peer-reviewed journals in migration studies,
diversity, housing, social policy and research methods.
Recent publications include Migration and the Search for
Home. Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives
(Palgrave, 2017) and the articles “Aspirations and the
subjective future of migration” (Comparative Migration
Studies, 2017), “At home in home care: Contents and
boundaries of the ‘domestic’ among immigrant live-in
workers in Italy” (Housing Studies, 2018), “Ambivalence and
the social processes of immigrant inclusion” (with P. Kivisto,International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 2019).

Please RSVP online via www.ias.uwa.edu.au/masterclass/boccagni

17:00 - SEMINAR - UWA Music presents: Research | Callaway Centre Seminar Series : Music Students' Society: The Great Debate

A public lecture by Professor Nicoletta Marconi, University of Roma Tor Vergata and 2019 Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

The contribution of female artists and craftswomen to the history of construction in early modern Rome forms an understudied part of the development of patronage of the arts and crafts of the period. It reveals another facet to the realization of ambitious social ennobling programs undertaken by papal and noble families of the Roman Curia in the Baroque period.

Nicoletta Marconi is Associate Professor in the History of Architecture at the University of Roma Tor Vergata. Her research explores the architectural and construction history of early modern Rome, with a particular focus on the St. Peter’s in Vatican building site, on architectural heritage of the Barberini family and the role of contribution of female artists and craftswomen to the history of construction in early modern Rome. She has contributed to many exhibitions and research projects, as well as published in collections and monographs.

This year the Update tackles the important question of belonging, with the theme ‘Belonging in Western Australia: Addressing Migrant and Refugee Inclusion’. Each year around 200,000 people move permanently to Australia, and many more come temporarily for work or education – how are we, as a community, meeting their needs and ensuring they feel they ‘belong’ in Australia? Our program brings together policy makers, not-for-profits, communities and academics to explore questions such as:
What does belonging look like?
What are migrants’ and ethnic minorities’ experiences of inclusion and exclusion?
How can services support belonging?
To what extent is Australia’s migration system inclusive?
How can we create inclusive spaces for migrants?
What are the roles of schools, local councils, the media, and service organisations in generating belonging?
Keynote Prof Paolo Boccagni (University of Trento), will speak on “Migrant Home-making: Insights from Europe”, and a range of representatives from community, government and academia will discuss experiences of belonging and unbelonging, and programs designed to promote inclusion, including arts, sports, media, local government and education based interventions.

A public lecture by Elke Krasny, Professor for Art and Education, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

In medical terms critical care, also known as intensive care, is a specialized branch of medicine dedicated to diagnosing and treating life-threatening conditions. For this lecture, this term is borrowed to address the planet’s life-threatening condition. Throughout the twenty-first century the condition of the planet has made headlines. The news is not good. The diagnosis is bleak. We have come to understand that the Anthropocene-Capitalocene is straining the planet to its breaking point. The planet we live on and we live with is exhausted, drained, depleted, damaged, broken. Therefore, the planet is urgently in need of critical care to repair livability and inhabitability and to restore its condition for its continued existence in the future.

Architecture and urbanism are at the heart of the modern project of capitalism. Modernist aspirations in architecture were based on the powerful promise of building a better future. Today, we live in the ruins of this promise. This lecture asks in what ways architecture and urbanism starting from the given interdependence of economy, ecology, and labor, can contribute to such critical care taking, acknowledging that there is no promise of a better future, but much rather a process of permanent repair. Following Joan Tronto’s political notion of care as everything we do to maintain and repair ourselves and our environment, the chosen examples in architecture and urbanism provide evidence that through a perspective of care social and environmental justice are not mutually exclusive.

Elke Krasny is Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a cultural theorist, urban researcher, and curator. Her scholarship and her curatorial work focus on critical practices in architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art addressing the interconnectedness of ecology, economy, labor, memory, and feminisms.

Traditional forms of craftsmanship and craft production are types of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), and their survival has been challenged by urbanisation, industrialisation, and globalisation. This urgency motivates my doctoral research on heritage craft production in China, with the aim of balancing the sustainable development of profit-driven modern craft industries with the long-term conservation of the significant ICH. During my fieldwork in Jingdezhen which is the Porcelain Capital of China, a large number of interviewed porcelain craftsmen spoke highly of stateowned porcelain factories (SPFs) that operated from the mid to late 20th Century which was the period of centrally planned economy (CPE) in China. Based on grounded theory analysis of in-depth interviews with 14 former factory workers, the study concludes that the CPE in China has profoundly promoted the transmission of porcelain craftsmanship in Jingdezhen in breadth and depth. This study is thus an interrogation of whether experience can be drawn from SPFs for better ICH preservation contemporarily.